"The good news about that is that Elon has a president that he lets run the company."
Company Figurehead
SpaceX is one of NASA's key commercial partners. But this relationship has come under scrutiny in recent years as the aerospace company's owner, Elon Musk, has turned into an ever more erratic and controversial public figure.
Nevermind the setbacks suffered by Starship — its flagship rocket that NASA still plans on using to bring its astronauts down to the lunar surface even though its completion hangs in the balance — the fact of the matter is that Musk's unstable online behavior is becoming so inflammatory that it poses a threat to the smooth functioning of his companies, and in particular SpaceX's relationship with the government's space program.
But the agency's administrator Bill Nelson doesn't seem too phased by those concerns, Axios reports. Why? Because Musk is effectively out of the picture, according to Nelson, who instead says it's company president Gwynne Shotwell who's handling all the day-to-day operations while her boss is busy tweeting.
"The good news about that is that Elon has a president that he lets run the company," Nelson told Axios at its House Climate Week at the UN General Assembly on Monday.
Nelson also took the opportunity to praise Shotwell. "She's done a phenomenal job," he added. "And as we say in the South, the proof is in the pudding."
Tweeter in Chief
A lot of Musk's controversies center around X-formerly-Twitter, of which he is the current owner and former CEO. He was deeply involved in its operations in the year following his takeover, and continues to draw criticism for his leadership now even though it's now more hands-off.
But really, it's what he says on there that tends to land him in hot water.
From tweeting about assassinating presidential candidate Kamala Harris, to boosting racist rhetoric and conspiracy theories so frequently that we've stopped counting, to posting a bizarrely puerile poem during an all-night Twitter spree, it's no wonder that Musk's doesn't exactly come off as a stable, well-adjusted guy that you can count on — at least not anymore.
2nd Burn
In light of all that, Nelson's comments about Musk are a deft bit of deflection. No need to get tied up in all that baggage. But the funny thing is that he's said pretty much the exact same thing before — down to making what sounds like a little dig at the SpaceX owner.
"One of the most important decisions [Musk] made, as a matter of fact, is he picked a president named Gwynne Shotwell," Nelson said in an interview with NPR in May.
So it could be that ol' Bill is already bored of hearing the same question. Or maybe he's genuinely relieved that a guy who seems to spend most of his time losing his mind on Twitter isn't running the whole show.
For now, the most pressing item on NASA's list is retrieving its two astronauts stranded on the International Space Station after the failure of Boeing's Starliner, which brought the crew members there. To bring them back home, it's relying on SpaceX, which despite everything about its owner, has been a safe steward for the space agency.
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